He did not want a funeral, nor a memorial service. Even after his death, Japanese designer Issey Miyake is unconventional. On August 5, the 84-year-old died creatively from the effects of liver cancer in a hospital in Tokyo. The Issey Miyake Group announced this on Tuesday.
As modest as the man was in his farewell wishes, so exuberant could he be during his label’s shows. Those were – completely different from the shows of his well-known compatriot Yohji Yamamoto – few solemn states. At Miyake, the models laughed, danced and were more human than model. His shows featured musicians and acrobats, and his creations were colorful, cheerful, energetic and exuberant.
Clothing, Miyake thought, was a better name for his creations than fashion. He called himself a humanist, was interested in people and subservient to the human body. He designed outfits that made every imaginable movement possible. He was also a great innovator in the field of engineering and technology. His pleated blinds, which he launched in 1988 under the name Pleats please, became iconic. His most famous client, Steve Jobs, ordered his well-known black turtleneck sweaters from Miyake by the dozen.
Eyewitness of nuclear attack
Issey Miyake was born on April 22, 1938 in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. At the age of 7, he and his sister witnessed the atomic attack on August 6, 1945, when American troops dropped the ‘Little Boy’ bomb. From the surrounding hills they saw their city being destroyed. It wasn’t until decades later, in order to support President Obama’s pursuit of nuclear disarmament, that Miyake was able to rekindle his trauma. In The New York Times he wrote in 2009: ‘When I close my eyes I still see things that no one should ever see: a bright red light, the black cloud shortly after, people running in all directions desperately trying to escape – I remember me all. Within three years my mother died from radiation exposure.’
Miyake’s way of coping with loss and counterbalancing destruction was to create things that bring joy and beauty. He considered dancing, but decided to study graphic design at Tokyo’s Tama University of Art, graduating in 1964. Via the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, where it turned out that he could sketch, but did not excel in pattern drawing and sewing, he ended up at the Paris fashion school of the Chambre Syndicale de la mode. Once in Paris, he started sketching for Hubert de Givenchy and Guy Laroche, of whom he became an apprentice.
After a stay in the New York art scene in the late 1960s, Miyake returned to Japan in 1970, to present his first fashion collection in 1971 from his own design studio. “All my work stems from the simplest ideas dating back to the earliest civilizations: making clothes from a single piece of cloth,” Miyake wrote in an email interview with The New York Times in 2014. That philosophy resulted years later in his still existing sub-label A-POC, short for ‘a piece of cloth’.
Incredibly innovative and inventive
In addition to simplicity, innovation could also count on Miyake’s warm interest. After he opened the exhibition Inventive Clothes: 1909-1939 in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he helped get that exhibition to Japan. Miyake’s own designs were also unprecedentedly innovative and inventive. In addition to fabrics, he experimented with non-textile materials such as iron wire, plastic and paper.
He made the cover of the art magazine in 1982 with a rattan dress art forum. Whether it was art he made, Miyake didn’t care. “He rejected any suggestion that what he was doing was art,” fashion journalist Tim Blanks wrote in a posthumous fashion site. The Business of Fashion“although it was often so breathtakingly transcendent that it’s hard to think otherwise.”
Miyake’s biggest hit came in 1988 when he released a collection called please (folds please). It involved polyester clothing that was folded into small accordion-like pleats, wrapped in layers of paper and then placed under a heat press. This treatment kept the fabric pleated for good, even after washing, as if the pleats had been etched into the memory of the fabric. An additional advantage was that the pleated pleats did not crease, and were therefore perfectly suitable to take with you in the travel case. This revolutionary find resulted in the sub-labels Pleats Please and Homme Plissé – and in endless imitations by other designers and retail chains.
From clothes to bags to fragrances
In addition to the pleated labels, Miyake established six other sub-labels over the years, all based on different concepts and with their own products, such as the Bao Bao bags made of triangles. In addition, he launched a number of perfumes with the company Shiseido. In particular, L’Eau d’Issey from 1992, created by ‘nose’ Jacques Cavallier, became a worldwide hit.
In 1994, Miyake handed over the creative direction of his men’s fashion line to his team, a few years later he let go of women’s fashion. He devoted the freed up time to researching new forms and materials.
In 1998 the Paris Fondation Cartier honored him with the exhibition Issey Miyake Making Things. Although the exhibition bore his name, he generously shared the credit for his creation. Miyake made it loud and clear that his entire team was indispensable to him in creating his collections. The cool title was meant as a statement, to indicate that what Miyake did was really not art, as many admirers and colleagues did think and think. Miyake, the eternally modest Japanese himself thought, just made things, period.
3 x Issey Miyake
Miyake made more than fashion. For Artemide, he created IN-EI shade lamps from recycled material, based on research by computer scientist Jun Mitanivan of the University of Tsukuba.
The standout piece in his very first collection was a dress with a tattoo print by Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix by artist Makiko Minagawa.
In 2007, Miyake founded the Reality Lab, a group that develops eco-friendly and resource-conscious materials to recreate and recreate even better things. He also opened his own museum 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo.
